Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2002/104

Forward-Secure Signatures with Fast Key Update

Anton Kozlov and Leonid Reyzin

Abstract: In regular digital signatures, once the secret key is compromised, all signatures, even those that were issued by the honest signer before the compromise, will not be trustworthy any more. Forward-secure signatures have been proposed to address this major shortcoming.

We present a new forward-secure signature scheme, called KREUS, with several advantages. It has the most efficient Key Update of all known schemes, requiring just a single modular squaring. Our scheme thus enables more frequent Key Update and hence allows shorter time periods, enhancing security: fewer signatures might become invalid as a result of key compromise. In addition, the on-line component of signing is also very efficient, consisting of a single multiplication. We precisely analyze the total signer costs and show that they are lower when the number of signatures per time period is small; the advantage of our scheme increases considerably as the number of time periods grows.

Our scheme's security relies on the Strong-RSA assumption and the random-oracle-based Fiat-Shamir transform.